Does the bestselling book on sales provide new insights?

Geoffrey James is one of the best sales expert bloggers and is the sales go-to guy for Inc. magazine. I’m pushing this along because he and I are in sync on the bestselling book, “The Challenger Sale” in that it’s mostly a retread of proven selling concepts combined with some original and flawed advice. It’s a good example of how attractive the marketing of “new selling ideas” can be. I know the industry very well and frankly, there aren’t any groundbreaking new methodologies that I’ve come across since Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling research and findings which Xerox sponsored over 25 years ago.

My advice is rather than looking for the flavour of the month, get your team mastering the fundamentals — setting goals, managing their time, prospecting, presenting and closing — by engaging in great training followed by relentless practice and implementation. Check out Geoff’s article in Inc. here.

When a company like Disney states that they consider training to be a key element in their company’s success, people should listen. They state accurately that training should be embedded in the company’s operation.

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Here’s a good post by another sales team development company that I respect (There are many I don’t!) It speaks of the uncompromising approach of Steve Jobs and how we need to take the same line with the design of our sales teams. I agree with the “no negotiation” attitude. As sales leaders, we need to do what we know is the right thing for our salespeople’s long term career growth, even if it means laying down the law in the short term.

We would be well be advised, however, do it in a manner that has more heart than Steve Jobs’ widely reported tyrannical style!

I bet just a few minutes ago! This is a great article inspiring us to change the nasty habit of checking our phone hundreds of times per day into something more meaningful. So many of us mistake being “busy” with being productive. Salespeople, by nature, are very prone to this “busy-ness” syndrome. Doing things that get you closer to you goals is the key and checking emails and texting incessantly doesn’t usually help. Click here to check it out.

The debate rages on whether leading a sales team is an art or a science.

Many people think that certain people are born leaders. That somewhere deep in their DNA resides the “leadership” set of genes. Conversely, there are others who believe that leadership is simply a skill and process that, if applied, will get results. Who’s right? Based on research and my anecdotal experience, I’d say that great sales leaders have an envious blend of both.

I believe that following proven leadership processes and systems is a much greater factor in sales leadership success than what most think. We know that there are personality types more suited to leadership than others such as the ones with the “dominant” trait but this hardly guarantees sales leadership success.

Recent research by my friend Charles’ company, Material Minds, has found that the strongest leaders view management as a process — if you do certain things in a certain way, you’ll get results. I absolutely agree. I’ve trained and coached many sales managers over the years and I have seen proof. The ones that follow the steps that I recommend end up growing their team and their sales. For example, implementing a goal setting and review process, having weekly one-on-one meetings with their reps and doing regular coaching calls are all foundational sales leadership functions.

“The ones that follow the steps end up growing their team.”

Yes, skill is required to do these properly but good training will solve that challenge. If you take someone with the skills and they DO these things on a regular basis, they will get the results but they need to follow the process. Back in university when I was a student franchisee for College Pro Painters, following “the system” was driven into us including how to manage and lead your team. They knew what worked and didn’t so we didn’t have to learn on our own.

I recently met with a Vice President of Sales name Ali who manages a large, Toronto based, sales force spanning the country. During our meeting, Ali shared with me all the different things he’s doing to lead the team, all of which were very impressive. He approachs things in a very systematic manner yet has only been in the role for 2 years. I asked him what he did prior and was shocked when he told me he was an engineer and had never been a salesperson! To illustrate my point of leadership being more of a science than art, Ali has significantly grown the sales because he applied his engineering skills to the sales force.

Unfortunately, a classic mistake made by sales organizations is to promote their best salesperson to a sales leader position without the proper sales management training and development of the management systems. Inevitably, they fail.

If you are a sales manager, here are your actions for this week:

Make a list of the key management activities that will grow your salespeople

Note how often or how many of these should be done on a monthly basis per rep

Note how many you are currently doing Figure out how you can get these numbers closer (the hard part!)

The bottom line is that as long as you are driven and willing to learn, you can become an exceptional sales leader like Ali!

I just read a very well written article in Profit from Mark Stuyt which spells the end of salespeople who customers have counted on in the past to be sources of product information. I couldn’t agree more. Salespeople can expect to find it increasingly hard to entice customers to engage with them if they don’t provide any value over what a few minutes of web research can do. Salespeople, on the other hand, who have been well trained to take a true consultative approach will find the transition to the new world of selling much easier.

Why? Because they will be able to uncover the problems, issues and needs with a potential buyer and armed with this deep knowledge and their industry experience, give advice on solutions that fit. A great salesperson can also help a customer see problems and opportunities that they might not even realize they have.

I recently read that the average buyer will be 65% of the way through the selling process before engaging a salesperson. If you are not much more than a “talking brochure or website” as a salesperson, there is nothing you can help the customer with and you will be left out of the process. This points to a need for sales professionals to be just that … more professional.

This is a great article from Fast Company on the importance of daily practice in mastering anything – skateboarding or sales. It emphasizes that quantity, not quality is what needs to happen. Ask yourself, when was the last time I honed my selling skills by formal practice? Most salespeople should be practicing the fundamentals weekly and any new skill, daily, as the article suggests. See the full article here.

Knowing where your time is being used will allow you to spend more time on the sales activities that make you money.
I don’t read many books but at least I try to implement good ideas from the ones I do get around to reading. One of the oldest books on my shelf that is still in my top 10 is “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. The chapter on time management speaks of all activities in you life fitting into one of four quadrants. The concept is that there are two variables that can be attached to any activity: 1) Level of urgency and 2) Level of importance. Plotting one of these against the other produces four quadrants as in the diagram below. Armed with this insight, you’ll be able to make better choices deciding what you’re going to spend your time on and be more effective.

Let’s first be sure we understand the difference between urgency and importance as people often confuse them with each other. “Importance” represents the amount of value that this activity brings to you. A good example would be preparing a proposal for a big prospect. On the other hand, “urgency” refers to how quickly it needs to be done. Responding to a complaint from your biggest customer is a good example of an urgent activity. Combining both urgency and importance allow us to place them in quadrants 1 through 4. You’ll see some examples of common activities also noted in the diagram.

The problem is when we end up spending most of our time reacting to urgent activities, quadrants 1 & 3, the important but non-urgent activities in quadrant 2 take a back seat — sometimes forever! People who live in the world of urgency often love the thrill of the accompanying adrenaline rush but fail to grow. Sadly, they also find themselves suffering from areas of their career and life that have been ignored. We’ve all heard the stories of hard driving executives whose health is failing.

Closer to home, I’ve see countless salespeople who want greater sales success but can’t manage to find the time to attend training sessions or do 1 more hour of prospecting each week. They spend their time on low value, urgent things or even worse, low importance, low urgency activities like surfing the web or watching TV. They “major in the minors.” I’m not saying that web surfing and TV can’t be very entertaining but if it’s at the expense of building your career, getting healthy or spending time with your kids, I’d argue that it’s not the best use of one’s time.

Why does this happen? Because quadrant 2 activities take planning and discipline to happen. They don’t just appear out of nowhere crying for your attention whereas urgent activities, by definition, do. If you don’t workout today, what’s the big deal? It won’t kill you — at least not today. If you don’t make those 3 extra calls, it’s not going to kill your career — at least not today.

Your homework: Set the alarm on your smartphone to alert you every half hour. When it goes off, write down what you did in the last 30 minutes. Do this for 3 days and then mark beside each item which quadrant it falls into. Add them up in total time. I promise you that you will be shocked when you see how much time you are spending in quadrants 3 & 4. I’m also very confident that you will want the time you spent on quadrant 2 activities to increase. The good news is that after this exercise, it will start to happen as you gain increased awareness and focus of where your time is going.

Effective people, in sales or otherwise, are experts in managing their time and have developed a ruthless approach to “time suckers.” Apply this knowledge and you too can be one of these people.

There’s a difference between being persistent and being a pest!

“What’s a reasonable amount of follow-up?” “If I’m not getting a response, when should I give up?” “Am I jeopardizing the sale if I’m too persistent?” These are all questions that often come up in our Power Prospecting workshop. How often to contact a prospect is a complex subject and one that I hope to clear up for you. Let’s take a deeper look at this issue.

The effort required to connect with someone, especially by phone, is dramatically greater today than it was even a few years ago. In the mid-90’s, just when voicemail was becoming commonplace, a business person could expect to connect to another business person 22% of the time or just shy of 1 in 5 times. Today, that number has jumped to 1 in 7. With the daily tsunami of email, getting people to respond by phone is more difficult than ever. This adds up to salespeople getting pushed to the bottom of the priority list in the business world.

To get someone’s attention and raise the level of urgency requires more frequent contact attempts than most salespeople are initially comfortable with. I think you’ll agree that proper business etiquette is to return voicemails within a day. For this reason, if you don’t connect live and instead, have to leave a voicemail, I recommend you give your prospective customer a day or so to return it. It’s helpful to set the expectation in your voicemail by saying something like, “If you don’t have a chance to get back to me in the next couple of days, I’ll try you again at your desk on Thursday morning.” When you call them on Thursday, this does a couple of things for you. First, it separates you from some salespeople in that you kept your promise. Second, your prospect will quickly understand that you’re going to be persistent in a polite, professional way.

A popular mistake by some salespeople is the mind reading they do of their prospect. “Gee, they haven’t called me back so I guess that means they aren’t interested. I don’t want to annoy them.” This assumption is very wrong. In the vast majority of cases, your prospects are busy people, just like you are, and unfortunately, returning sales calls falls to the bottom of their to-do list. When you eventually do connect, you will find that your polite persistence will most often generate a response something like, “I got your voicemails. I’m really sorry I haven’t called you back. We’ve just been crazy busy around here.” Frankly, I’ve made over 3000 prospecting calls since founding Northbound and I’ve only had one person ever say, “If I were interested, I would have called you back.” That’s right … ONE! Just last week, I finally got through to two prospective customers who I had left several voicemails and emails with. Did they say, “Michael, you are annoying me. I’m obviously not interested.” Not at all. In fact, both of them apologized profusely for not getting back to me and I booked meetings with each of them.

Polite, professional persistence is what often separates low performers from the great ones.

Your actions this week:

Mix up your contact methods with prospects you’re trying to connect with this week. Use a combination of voicemail, email, LinkedIn messages, hand written notes, personal visits, even fax! You’ll see that it increases your response.

Keep careful track of your contact attempts along with dates. Try to get at least 2 contact attempts in per week and don’t give up until you’ve tried at least 7 times.

Northbound’s “Connecting to Mr. Big Cheese” workshop teaches you a proven system to connect with high level decision makers and motivate them to want to meet. To learn more or for pricing, contact Michael at mcaron@northboundsales.com or 416.456.1440.

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Don’t try to close without opening first

You can’t close effectively if you don’t have closing ammunition

Have you ever noticed how salespeople just seem to connect to each other regardless of age, industry or even nationality? I experienced this first hand on a vacation in Florida a few weeks ago where I had the pleasure of meeting a gracious American retired sales professional named Jim Mandy. Jim was kind enough to share some of his best sales strategies from over the years and I’d like to share one of them with you.
Jim and I both agreed that far too much emphasis is placed on closing in sales training and in conversation among salespeople. As a trainer, I often get asked by sales leaders to come in and “help my people close.” Unfortunately, after doing some investigation, the real problem usually makes itself clear. The sales reps can’t close because they’ve done a poor job of all the steps leading up to the close. Some people still believe that using outdated and unprofessional verbal trickery at the end of a poorly executed selling process will somehow persuade a customer to buy even when the salesperson has done very little to demonstrate a need or provide an effective solution.

If you’ve properly completed the steps in the consultative selling system, closing will be easy and quick. If not, it will be hard and slow.

The key to closing starts way back at the beginning of the selling process by doing a great job of uncovering issues, challenges, goals and preferences. This is best done by using carefully written, preplanned questions in what Jim calls the “survey” phase. This is sometimes also called the “discovery” phase in other sales models.

The next step to make closing easy is to demonstrate to the customer how your solution fits with their unique problems. Optimally, you should provide unshakeable evidence that you can deliver on what you claim through case studies, testimonials or key performance metrics. This phase is called “product info” in Jim’s model.

For everything but very small sales, I recommend the above steps are done in separate meetings with the customer. Only after you’re finished with these steps have you earned the right to close. If done properly, the close (also known as “asking for the order”) should be a nonevent and could be as simple as saying something like, “Would you like to go ahead with blank?” If the customer has agreed throughout the selling process that they need their problem fixed and has confidence that you’re the one to fix it, why would you need to do anything “tricky” to close?

In our meeting, Jim illustrated this idea by pulling out a 3 x 5 recipe card with a carefully hand drawn diagram which I have tried to replicate here.

My recommended action plan to implement Jim’s powerful model is:

1) Go into your next sales call with a set of preplanned questions that will help you uncover your customer’s true issues and their impact.

2) At your next meeting, confirm with the customer that you have captured the issues accurately.

3) Carefully and systematically demonstrate how you can solve these issues better than anyone. After describing each feature and their related function and benefit, get confirmation from the customer that he agrees that it will address the aforementioned issues.
3) Close. Ask for the order in a direct and confident manner!

I could have shared sales stories with Jim all day. We were like two fishermen bragging about our biggest catch and giving advice on our best lures. My last piece of advice is the next time you meet a friendly retired sales professional like Jim, take some time to listen carefully. You never know what you might learn. As the adage goes, there’s no substitute for experience!

These techniques and more are taught in Northbound’s “Moving Customers to a Commitment” workshop. For more information contact us at info@northboundlearning.com